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May 7, 2012

Enable Intel HD 2000 graphics on your Hackintosh (experimental)

If you have a Hackintosh running Mac OS X Lion, it's pretty easy to enable the HD 3000 graphics built into Intel processors. However, Mac OS X Lion doesn't natively support Intel's HD 2000 graphics, so Hackintoshes with HD 2000 have been out of luck-- until now. Thanks to recent developments, it is now possible to enable HD 2000 graphics on Hackintoshes running Mac OS X Lion, by replacing several default graphics kexts with modified versions and installing a modified version of Chameleon bootloader.
To make things clear, this is not full support. Mac OS X does not work with HD 2000 graphics natively, so the best you can do is trick OS X into thinking that it does. This allows HD 2000 to display Mac OS X at full resolution, but graphics acceleration still doesn't work. Without graphics acceleration, you can't run any games, or apps that require serious graphics power (like video editors).

Find out if your processor is supported

If you want to find out whether your Intel processor uses HD 2000 or 3000, you can Google the model of your processor. For example, if you search "Core i5-2500" on Google, the first result is Intel's official page for the Intel Core i5-2500. According to the "Graphics Specifications" section of that page, the Intel Core i5-2500 uses "Intel® HD Graphics 2000".

If you have "Intel® HD Graphics 3000", check out the guide for HD 3000 instead. If your processor only has "Intel® HD Graphics", it isn't supported by Mac OS X.

Additionally, your computer's motherboard has to support integrated graphics. P67 motherboards are the only type of motherboard for Intel 2nd-generation processors that don't support integrated graphics; all other types of motherboards should work.

1. Adjust your BIOS
For starters, you need to change a graphics setting in your computer's BIOS (which is essentially the settings page for your motherboard). Boot your computer, and enter the BIOS. To enter the BIOS on a Gigabyte motherboard, you have to press the delete key when it boots (before the operating system starts). Different manufacturers set different keys for opening the BIOS.

If you have a Gigabyte motherboard, there will be a setting called "On-Chip Frame Buffer Size", located in the "Advanced BIOS Features" page. This sets how much video RAM your processor's HD 2000 graphics will use. Motherboards from different brands might call this setting something else.

If your Hackintosh has 4 GB of RAM, set video RAM to 384MB. If your Hackintosh has 8 GB of RAM, set video RAM to 480MB.

3. Install Chameleon Bootloader
Chameleon Bootloader is the most popular bootloader for Hackintoshes. For those of you who don't know, the bootloader is the program that boots Mac OS X. Chameleon is an open-source project, meaning that there are a lot of different versions of it (including Chimera, which is tonymacx86's version of Chameleon). For this guide, you need to download a version of Chameleon that has been modified to inject the device ID of your HD 2000 graphics into Mac OS X Lion's graphics drivers.

4. Replace the kexts
Once you've downloaded the ZIP file from the link below, open the ZIP file. Inside the newly-appeared folder, you will see a variety of .kext, .plugin, and .bundle files. These are modified versions of the standard Mac OS X Lion graphics drivers.

Go to /System/Library/Extensions in your Hackintosh's hard drive, and delete all of the files that have the same name as the files from your downloaded folder. If you don't want to delete them, you can also just move them to somewhere else on your hard drive (as a backup).

5. Fix file permissions/install a system definition
If you don't already have it on your Hackintosh, download Multibeast. You have to register on tonymacx86.com first to download it.

Open Multibeast, and install "System Utilities" and "Mac mini" system definition. "System Utilities" fixes the permissions of the new files that you added in the previous step. A system definition pretends that your Hackintosh is a real Mac. When Mac OS X Lion sees that your Hackintosh is a "Mac mini", it enables the built-in HD 3000 drivers (which you have modified to work with HD 2000). You can also use the "Macbook Pro 8,1" system definition, though "Mac mini" is generally recommended.

Once the installation finishes, reboot your computer. Hopefully, once Mac OS X restarts, it will display at full resolution.

Ending Notes
Remember, HD 2000 support on Hackintoshes is purely experimental! As mentioned earlier, though this method should enable full resolution on Mac OS X, there is no graphics acceleration (better known as QE/CI). When possible, you should still try to avoid using HD 2000 graphics at all.